Kengo Kuma lectures in San Diego and NYC this week!

Tonight, Kengo Kuma will be lecturing at the Woodbury School of Architecture in San Diego at 6:30pm. Shortly following his Woodbury appearance, the Japanese architect will then make his way across the country to Columbia University’s GSAAP (Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation)Wood Auditorium in New York City to present his lecture, Minimize: Small Architecture after 3/11, on Wednesday the 10th at 6:30pm. Both lectures are free and open to the public.

“We have to start from scratch,” contends Kengo Kuma. The unprecedented damage wrought by the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown on March 11, 2011 collapsed structures and shook faith in large-scale architecture and power systems—most devastatingly, the rational concrete and steel of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

Kuma advocates for minimizing by designing modest, self-powered interventions that are made with local materials. “The whole world is shifting toward small things. We are no longer passive creatures who are spoon-fed from a giant yet unreliable system,” he argues. “A new relationship is being formed between people and the world.”